We Rely On Your Support: This site is primarily supported by advertisements. Ads are what have allowed this site to be maintained for the past 15 years. We do our best to ensure only clean, relevant ads are shown, when any nasty ads are detected, we work to remove them ASAP. If you would like to view the site without ads while still supporting our work, please consider our ad-free Phoronix Premium. You can also consider a tip via PayPal.How The Radeon RX Vega Performance Has Evolved Since Launch

As part of our end-of-year benchmarking, a Phoronix Premium supporter had brought up the idea of seeing how the Radeon RX Vega Linux driver performance has evolved since launch. Ask and you shall receive: here's some numbers showing the state of the Radeon RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64 performance with the open-source RadeonSI+AMDGPU performance as of this week compared to back on launch-day.

With the RX Vega 56 and RX Vega 64 I re-tested these cards on the same Core i7 7740X configuration as used in our original Vega Linux benchmarks but now with the very latest driver stack. Back during launch-day that initial Vega support meant a patched out-of-tree Linux 4.12 kernel (due to needing AMDGPU DC support) and Mesa 17.3-dev built against LLVM 6.0 SVN at the time. All tests were done from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

The latest RX Vega stack tested now with the i7-7740X + Ubuntu 16.04 system was using the Linux 4.15 Git kernel and Mesa 17.4-dev built against the latest LLVM 6.0 SVN back-end. Those updated user-space components were from the Padoka PPA while the kernel was from the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA.

The RX Vega open-source Linux driver stack has matured a great deal since its launch this summer. With the Linux 4.15 kernel is also where the open-source Vega support with display capabilities is working out-of-the-box thanks to AMDGPU DC being merged. The RADV Vulkan driver support is also now suitable for Vega where as launch-day it was not: thus for this article it's also only OpenGL RadeonSI testing in order to compare the performance.

The mission at Phoronix since 2004 has centered around enriching the Linux hardware experience. In addition to supporting our site through advertisements, you can help by subscribing to Phoronix Premium. You can also use our NewEgg.com shopping links when making online purchases or contribute to Phoronix through a PayPal tip.